HYDERABAD: With economic and market disruptions becoming more frequent and macroeconomic as well as geopolitical factors impacting business, companies across the world are facing unprecedented uncertainties today. However, Indian firms are relatively better off compared to their global counterparts, according to Martin Reeves, senior partner and managing director, Boston Consulting Group, New York.
In an interaction with Express, Reeves highlighted the advantages that Indian companies have - a high proportion of family companies and conglomerates, strong pool of engineering talent, English-speaking graduates among others.
“Strategy is universal and companies are facing a common set of challenges worldwide. Nevertheless, Indian business environment does have some special features which may influence this strategy equation,” said Reeves. Conglomerates have the potential to diversify risks by backing new sources of growth while harvesting mature ones, he added. “Family enterprises, according to our analysis, are more conservative and resilient to change on average,” noted Reeves, who has authored ‘Your Strategy Needs a Strategy’ focusing on adaptive strategy.
Reeves, who specialises in the areas of adaptive strategy, strategy for multi business systems with expertise in product innovation and development, explained that forward-looking companies are responding to the disruption by increasing external intelligence about change, increasing capabilities in economic and political analysis, and improving capability to shape their business environments rather than merely responding to change.
Reeves noted that companies place enormous expectations on new areas like artificial intelligence, but he dismissed the notion that automation would lead to job losses.
“We just completed a major study with MIT of 3,000 companies globally on the state of AI deployment. What we found was that expectations are very high, with 85 percent of companies expecting AI to impact their competitive advantage within five years,” said Reeves.